Over the past few years, I've shown you how to build custom RSS aggregators using PHP and MySQL and Ruby. Even five years after penning the former tutorial, RSS is going as strong as ever, depended upon by millions of users around the globe to keep track of an increasingly diverse array of online information. For instance, back in that 2004 tutorial I praised websites such as Yahoo!, CNET, and The Christian Science Monitor for their efforts to bring RSS to a larger population. Five years later, RSS feeds have become as commonplace as contact forms, and in fact their application has expanded to reading email, keeping tabs on the weather, and following your friends on Twitter. So, if you haven't already taken steps to integrate RSS feeds into your website, what's stopping you? You're not only denying your existing users a great mechanism for keeping tabs on your website's latest updates, but are potentially hindering audience growth by turning visitors insistent on cutting down on tedious repeat visitations to countless websites.
Still not convinced? What if I told you there's not only an incredibly easy way to build RSS feeds from your custom data, but also about a great solution for making money by integrating advertising directly into these feeds? By using the Zend Framework and Google AdSense, accomplishing both tasks is frighteningly easy. In this tutorial, I'll show you how.
Creating Custom Feeds with the Zend Framework
As you've seen in previous tutorials, the Zend Framework (see Twitter, internationalization, Amazon Web Services, and OpenID Authentication tutorials) offers Web developers a tremendously powerful solution not only for building maintainable websites, but also for taking advantage of the latest web services. This offering includes the Zend_Feed component, which makes it incredibly easy to both build and consume RSS feeds.
Read the Rest of this Article at Developer.com